Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Satpura, India's second Second Shivalik class Indigenous Stealth Frigate. Conceived and designed by the Indian Naval Design team to be the mainstay frigates of Indian Navy for the first half of 21 century. The ship is scheduled to be commissioned on 20 Aug 2011.

I get tired of journos who should know better repeating in whole cloth the Indian Navy's lie, about this being a stealth ship. Every article says 'stealth frigate' as if it were religious mantra. It is NOT. I is barely reduced radar cross-section. It is about as stealthy as the lying from Eurofighter and Dassealt about their products. I do not hear anyone calling the Burks 'stealth destroyers'.

Hull fabrication looks so bad in comparison to Ins Shivalik (f47). it was much smoother overall & nicely carved in front portion. Disappointingly this is looking disaster... who ever worked on its fabrication must be punished....

Stealth means lower radar cross section, use of radar wave absorbing material. It seems everyone is interpreting the term stealth in their own ways. Apart from India USA , USSR and Sweden have successfully designed and commissioned stealth warships. The detractors are requested to acknowledge India's indigineous ship building capability and not to make comments by looking at photographs , have patience till the ship is formally launched, compare with warships in the South East Asia region .

The P17 is an enlarged and modified version of the Talwar {Krivak III} Class frigates. It was jointly designed by the Naval Design Bureau (NDB) and Russia's Severnoye Project Design Bureau (Severnoye Proyektno-Konstruktorskoye Bjuro - SPKB). SPKB's design influence can be observed in the Delhi Class destroyers and Khukri / Kora Class corvettes. France's DCN International (DCNI) has been involved in this project as a consultant undertaking signature management studies.

The P17 is sadly a dated design by today's standards. It's radars and avionics(Fregat, Ajanta EW suite) are of 80s vintage, its stealth features(no composite superstructure or modular masts) are 90s level and its propulsion system is highly ineffiecient(2 diesels + 2 gas turbine engines when similar Western frigates can make do with 2 diesels + 1 turbine in an electric propulsion system). And so on...

I believe the best approach to follow for the future would be to do what Australia did: Assign a reputed Western shipbuilder to come up with a cutting-edge design and build a batch of three frigates in EVERY MAJOR SHIPYARD in India including private ones like L & T, Pipavav and Bharti.

That way even if delivery is delayed we'll end up with a sufficeint number of modern vessels in the end.